Monday, August 26, 2019

Trajectory and Splatter

We will never correctly anticipate what flavor of shit will hit the fan,
but we can calculate the trajectory and attempt to avoid the splatter.

- James Alan Gardner, All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault

This week's featured post is "Follow-up to 'How Should We Rewrite the Second Amendment?'" Last week's post somehow went viral in the pro-gun world, earning me a stream of negative comments. Those comments are a window into the minds of people I don't usually hear from.

One type of comment I forgot to cover in that piece. A number of commenters couldn't imagine that I really was what I claimed to be: a person of generally liberal views who nonetheless was trying to figure out what the right policy might be. Clearly I was a confiscate-them-all anti-gun radical who was just trying suck people in by pretending to rationally evaluate a variety of views.

I don't know if there's any worthwhile response to that level of cynicism and closed-mindedness. I suspect there's some projection going on. People who often argue in bad faith easily imagine that other people are doing the same thing.

This week everybody was talking about the Trump Show

He outdid himself this week, unleashing a variety and extremity of presidential craziness that used to exist only in satire. Republican strategist Rick Wilson described the President's week like this:

A combination of waking hallucinations, verbal tics, lies surpassing even his usual fabulist standard, aphasias and lunatic blurtings

James Fallows said what we've all been thinking:

If Donald Trump were in virtually any other position of responsibility, action would already be under way to remove him from that role.

I could easily spend all my time this week talking about how nutty this stuff is, but I think that's what he wants: that we should talk about him and his antics rather than the signs of a slowing economy, the badly misconceived trade war with China, his continuing vassalhood to Vladimir Putin, the ongoing climate disaster, the unlikelihood of getting any Republican cooperation toward limiting gun violence, and so on.

So I'm going to assume you've heard about the individual trolling incidents already, not mention what he said, and skip straight to the debunking:

If you've been away from the news all week, looked at that list, and said "What?" you've understood how the rest of us have felt this week. It was seven days of "What?"

and the possibility that Trump's trade war will start a recession

Bill Clinton famously felt your pain. Trump defender Lindsey Graham wants you to accept the pain this administration's trade war is giving you.

The slowing economy and Trump's tariffs' role in slowing it was probably the main thing the Trump Show was supposed to distract us from. Experts are divided on whether a recession will hit before the election, but I think this is a technical debate that is going to go right over the heads of the electorate: Growth is slowing down, and is likely to keep slowing down. Whether it's at .1% or -.1% on election day may matter to economists, but voters probably won't be able to tell the difference.

Typically, recessions are not uniform across the country. Large chunks of rural America (the people Trump promised to help) are probably already in recession, while some hot spots may miss a recession entirely.

Wapo columnist Catherine Rampell notes one economic hazard we've never experienced before: Trump never admits his mistakes, so if his policies cause a recession, he'll insist on doubling down on them.

The possibility of a synchronized global downturn would require some sort of coordinated global policy response, just as it did a decade ago during the Great Recession. But rather than evaluating how we got to the present situation, or how to make amends with the allies we might need to help get us out of it, we already know what Trump’s objective will be: proving his very wrong ideas were very right all along.

All the airtime went to Trump's "joke" about being "the chosen one" to stand up to China, but the real problem with his Chinese trade war is not getting the attention it deserves. Yes, there are long-standing disputes about the trade deficit (which Trump misunderstands) and more importantly about protecting US intellectual property. You can make a good case that the US needed to pressure China to play by the established rules of international trade.

The point that often gets lost is that Trump has implemented this pressure in a very stupid way: with unilateral tariffs rather than acting in cooperation with the EU, Japan, and our other allies. (That was the direction President Obama was headed with the Transpacific Partnership that Trump pulled the US out of.) Not only does unilateral action have a smaller effect on China than pressure from all sides, but it's also less effective psychologically and politically. The way Trump has set this up, he's asking China to yield to the United States. For China, that's a more humiliating option than changing its behavior in order to join the world community.

Xi can stand up to Trump and spin that to his own people as defending China's honor against American aggression. That spin would be much less convincing if he were thumbing his nose at the whole world.

One of the week's more insane tweets deserves a little attention:

Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.

Just about everybody who read that balked at the word ordered. Ordered? Since when does the president give orders to American businesses? I can barely imagine the wave of conservative outrage if President Obama had tried to order private corporations around.

Well, Trump insists he has that power.

For all of the Fake News Reporters that don’t have a clue as to what the law is relative to Presidential powers, China, etc., try looking at the Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. Case closed!

Vox' Anya van Wagendonk disputes that.

The president is not correct in this assertion. The Economic Powers Act allows the president of the United States to regulate commerce during a national emergency. It does not allow a president to order companies to close their factories in foreign countries, however. And as there has not yet been a national emergency declared with respect to Chinese trade, Trump’s present abilities to govern economic interactions with China are limited to measures like tariffs.

Whatever the EEPA allows, using it would have to follow the same pattern as Trump's money-grab to build the wall:

  1. Declare a specious national emergency.
  2. Veto Congress' attempt to cancel the emergency.
  3. Keep the support of at least 1/3 of one house of Congress, so that the veto can't be overriden.

That's not exactly a recipe for one-man rule, but it's close: rule by one man supported by 34 senators.

One problem we'll face if a recession does start is that there's not much to fight it with. Typically, governments shorten and mitigate the effects of a recession in two ways: fiscal and monetary. In other words, the government stimulate public-sector demand by running a deficit, and the central bank stimulates private-sector demand by cutting interest rates

Well, the fiscal stimulus got used up in tax cuts to big corporations and rich people like Trump himself. We're already going to run a $1 trillion deficit next year without any special recession-fighting programs. How much higher do we really want that to go?

And by historical standards, interest rates are quite low already. Trump is complaining that it's not fair that Germany gets to pay negative interest rates while his government pays positive rates. To me, that's like complaining that your friend with a broken leg gets opiates while you don't. We don't want our economy to be in the situation Germany's is.

and the Amazon region is on fire

The thousands of fires burning in the Amazon rain forest are calamitous for two reasons: First because they release lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and second because the forest may not grow back.

Scientists fear parts of the Amazon could pass a critical threshold and transform from a lush rainforest into a dry, woody grassland. And that could bring catastrophic consequences not only for people in South America, but also for everyone around the world.

Some of the fires are accidental, but a large number are intentional.

Instead of axes and machetes, people now use bulldozers and giant tractors with chains to pull down the Amazon’s towering trees. A few months later, they torch the trunks. It’s the only realistic way to remove such huge amounts of biomass, Morton said. “It’s slash and burn, 21st century.”

Thousands of acres at a time are being cleared for large-scale agriculture, he added. The land is primarily used as pasture for cattle — one of Brazil’s major exports — or for crops such as soybeans.

Some of the larger fires may be intentional deforestation fires that got out of control.

This is at least partly the consequence of Brazil's electing Jair Bolsonaro as president.

Bolsonaro has railed against protections for indigenous land and promised to boost the country’s economy. He has also weakened the government’s capacity for oversight and indicated he would not go after farmers, loggers and miners who seize and clear forest.

Bolsonaro is sometimes referred to as "the Trump of Brazil", and there are a number of similarities. For starters, his first response to reports of Amazon fires was to blame his enemies: environmentalists are setting the fires to make him look bad. Like Trump, he made the claim without citing any evidence.

More than a soccer field’s worth of Amazon forest is falling every minute, according to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, known as INPE. Preliminary estimates from satellite data revealed that deforestation in June rose almost 90% compared with the same month last year, and by 280% in July.

Bolsonaro called this report "a lie" and has fired INPE's director.

and (coincidentally) David Koch

I think it's unseemly to gloat over someone's death. But I'm also not willing to pretend that none of David Koch's evil deeds matter now, as if he were just an opponent in a game that his death brings to an end.

The New Republic interviewed Christopher Leonard, author of Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.

Koch Industries—that is, David and Charles Koch and their political network—has played an almost unparalleled role in helping to cast doubt on the basic science behind climate change; create doubt in the public mind that climate change is real; and particularly, most importantly, to cast doubt on the idea that government regulation can or should do anything to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

As early as 1991, Republican President G. H. W. Bush was ready to start taking action on climate change. And as late as 2007, candidate John McCain was saying in his stump speech that the problem was real and demanded action. But the Kochs pretty well squelched the Republican willingness to face reality, and instead made rejection of climate science a litmus test on the right.

So this world we're living in -- with its wildfires in the Amazon, more powerful hurricanes, shrinking polar icecaps, and so on -- is to a certain extent the creation of the Kochs. And that story doesn't end with David's death. In the coming decades, millions of climate refugees will be looking for homes, probably causing wars and revolutions as destination countries try either to accommodate them or keep them out. That's part of his legacy too.

OK, I can't help myself; I'm going to repeat somebody else's snarky remark. Here's Matt Binder on The Majority Report podcast:

Per his request, David Koch will be cremated along with the rest of planet Earth.

and the G7

Trump is once again proposing to let his patron, Vladimir Putin, back into the G7. This is a dumb idea for two major reasons:

  • Russia should never have gotten into the G7 in the first place, because G7 is a club of democratic nations with large economies. Russia does not qualify on either count. The point of including Russia in the 1990s was to encourage it to develop democratic institutions. That did not work.
  • Russia was ejected from the (then) G8 in 2014 to condemn its conquest of Crimea. It still holds Crimea, and is continuing to fight an aggressive proxy war against Ukraine. Since 2014, Russia has been promoting right-wing nationalist movements across the West, including aiding Trump in the US and Brexit in the UK.

European Council President Donald Tusk rejected re-admitting Russia, and proposed instead that Ukraine be invited as a guest.

The US hosts the next G7. Trump is talking about holding it at his own golf resort in Miami. He's president, so why shouldn't he make some money off of government events? Maybe our next president will own an aerospace company and award himself all the Air Force contracts.

and you also might be interested in ...

Naturally, all Trump's cultists had to tell us what a brilliant idea buying Greenland is. The WaPo's Marc Thiessen wrote a column about it. (He focused on the strategic reasons for wanting Greenland, and completely ignored the Danish prime minister's point: that we don't buy and sell people any more.) And NRCC started fund-raising with a t-shirt showing Greenland as part of the US.

Puerto Rico is in the path of another hurricane.

The higher hurdles to get into the September debate is driving some Democratic candidates out of the race: Seth Moulton joins Jay Inslee and John Hickenlooper on the sidelines.

Michael Bennet, who likely won't be in the debate but so far seems to be staying in the race, slammed the DNC process for "stifling debate" and "rewarding celebrity". I can't raise much sympathy for him. In two debates and months of campaigning, he has done little to distinguish himself. What exactly does he bring to the discussion that no other candidate does? The "celebrity" candidates -- I assume he means Michelle Williamson and Andrew Yang -- may not have much in the way of presidential qualifications, but they each raise issues that other candidates don't.

In my reading of the polls, only five candidates have proved that they have a real following: Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg. So far, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Julián Castro, Beto O'Rourke, and Yang (but not Williamson) have also qualified for the third debate, with Tom Steyer, Tulsi Gabbard, and Kirsten Gillibrand still in the running.

Notice anything strange about this lecture series?

and let's close with something too big to worry about us

NASA's photo of the day is of the Angel Nebula.

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Monday, August 19, 2019

Call or Fold

The American people are ill-served when our leaders put forward unfounded allegations of voter fraud. To put it in terms that a former casino operator should understand: There comes a time when you need to lay your cards on the table or fold.

- FEC Chair Ellen Weintraub

This week's featured post is "How Should We Rewrite the Second Amendment?"

This week everybody was talking about a change in immigration policy

If the courts don't block the proposed change in immigration rules, people who come here with nothing -- as a lot of the ancestors of current Americans did -- will have trouble getting in, trouble staying, and trouble becoming citizens.

Monday, acting US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Ken Cuccinelli announced the change:

Our rule generally prevents aliens, who are likely to become a public charge, from coming to the United States or remaining here and getting a green card. ... Under the rule, a public charge is now defined as an individual who receives one or more designated public benefits for more than 12 months in the aggregate within any 36-month period. ... Once this rule is implemented and effective on October 15th, USCIS Career Immigration Services Officers — what we call ISOs — will generally consider an alien’s current and past receipt of the designated public benefits while in the United States as a negative factor when examining applications.

CNN gives some context:

Under current regulations put in place in 1996, the term "public charge" is defined as someone who is "primarily dependent" on government assistance, meaning it supplies more than half their income. But it only counted cash benefits, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or Supplemental Security Income from Social Security. ...

[Advocates for immigrants] said [the new rule] would penalize even hard-working immigrants who only need a small bit of temporary assistance from the government.

The Washington Post elaborates:

[The new criteria] will skew the process in favor of the highly skilled, high-income immigrants President Trump covets. Since its first days, the Trump administration has been seeking ways to weed out immigrants the president sees as undesirable, including those who might draw on taxpayer-funded benefits.

Wealth, education, age and English-language skills will take on greater importance in the process of obtaining a green card, which is the main hurdle in the path to full U.S. citizenship.

WaPo's Eugene Robinson creates a hypothetical example:

Say you’re an immigrant from Mexico who came here legally to join family members who are already permanent residents or citizens. Say you’re working a full-time minimum-wage job, plus odd jobs nights and weekends. You are a productive member of society. You are paying payroll taxes, sales taxes, vehicle registration fees and other government levies. Still, as hard as you work, you can’t make ends meet.

You may be legally entitled to health care through Medicaid. You may be entitled to food assistance through the SNAP program, formerly known as food stamps. You may be entitled to housing assistance. But according to the new Trump administration rule — set to take effect in two months — if you use any of these programs, you might forfeit the opportunity to ever obtain a green card making you a permanent resident. That means you also forfeit the chance of ever becoming a citizen.

And Max Boot makes it personal:

I am certain that my family — my grandmother, mother and myself — had a credit score of zero when we arrived in 1976. There were no credit cards in the Soviet Union, and we didn’t have any money. We survived initially on handouts from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), whose help to more recent arrivals triggered the ire of the alleged Pittsburgh synagogue gunman. Luckily, my mother already spoke English, so she soon found a job. But my grandmother spoke only Russian and she was already retired. She got by with help from my family and her Supplemental Security Income and Medicare benefits. My family is far from rich, but we have been productive and repaid in taxes many times over the benefits my grandmother received — just as we repaid the aid from HIAS.

But if Trump had been in office then, I wonder whether my grandmother would have been barred entry or deported back to the U.S.S.R., where she had no one to take care of her? For that matter, I wonder whether any of us would have been allowed to come here given our unconscionable lack of a credit rating?

Here's a factor anyone should be able to appreciate: In this era of super-bugs, when antibiotics are starting to lose their effectiveness, we shouldn't be making people afraid to see a doctor. The most likely place for a really nasty plague to get started is among a group of people who either can't afford healthcare or avoid it for some other reason. So discouraging people from signing up for Medicaid is a bad idea for all of us.

During an interview Tuesday morning with NPR's Rachel Martin, Cuccinelli rewrote the inscription on the Statue of Liberty.

MARTIN: Would you also agree that Emma Lazarus' words etched on the Statue of Liberty - give me your tired, your poor - are also part of the American ethos?

CUCCINELLI: They certainly are - give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge. That plaque was put on the Statue of Liberty at almost the same time as the first public charge law was passed - very interesting timing.

Clarifying Tuesday evening to CNN's Erin Burnett, Cuccinelli said that Lazarus' poem had European immigrants in mind.

Of course that poem was referring back to people coming from Europe where they had class-based societies, where people were considered wretched if they weren't in the right class, and it was written one year after the first federal public charge rule was written.

At best, he was denying that the poem's "give me ... your poor" refers to people who lack money, rather than just those who weren't born into the aristocracy. At worst, he was dog-whistling to white supremacists. (Among white supremacists who are trying to sound respectable, "European" has become a less obviously racist way of saying "white".)

Trevor Noah has figured out the true target of Trump's hard line on immigration: He wants to deport Melania.

and two members of Congress who won't be going to Israel

Vice summarizes:

  • First, [Rep. Rashida] Tlaib and her colleague in the House, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar were scheduled to visit Israel. They’re both supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which promotes boycotting Israel in protest of its human rights abuses against Palestinians.
  • But after some prodding from President Donald Trump, Israel barred the lawmakers from entering the country on Thursday. “It would show great weakness if Israel allowed Rep. Omar and Rep.Tlaib to visit,” the president tweeted.
  • The move sparked widespread outrage. Even the American Israel Public Affairs Committee was upset with the decision.
  • Friday morning, Israel said it would allow Tlaib to enter the country for a humanitarian visit so long as she didn’t promote protests during the trip. “This could be my last opportunity to see her,” Tlaib wrote of her grandmother in a letter. “I will respect any restrictions and will not promote boycotts against Israel during my visit.”

But after thinking about it, Tlaib changed her mind:

When I won, it gave the Palestinian people hope that someone will finally speak the truth about the inhumane conditions. I can't allow the State of Israel to take away that light by humiliating me & use my love for my sity to bow down to their oppressive & racist policies.

So then the deal was off and she isn't going.

Always classy, Trump closed with this gratuitous insult:

The only real winner here is Tlaib’s grandmother. She doesn’t have to see her now!

He probably thought he had gotten the last word, but he didn't reckon with Tlaib's grandmother:

Ninety-year-old Muftia Tlaib, sitting in her garden in the village of Beit Ur Al-Fauqa, was not impressed. “Trump tells me I should be happy Rashida is not coming,” she said. “May God ruin him.”

The issue here is a bit bigger than Tlaib, her grandmother, Trump, and Netanyahu. Thomas Friedman comments:

Trump — with the knowing help of Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu — is doing something no American president and Israeli prime minister have done before: They’re making support for Israel a wedge issue in American politics.

Few things are more dangerous to Israel’s long-term interests than its becoming a partisan matter in America, which is Israel’s vital political, military and economic backer in the world.

and the inverted yield curve

In general, the longer you want to borrow someone's money, the higher the interest rate they will charge you. This seems as if it ought to be a natural law. After all, the two main common-sense justifications for charging interest are

  • the borrower gets to consume now while the lender delays his or her consumption,
  • and the lender is taking the risk that the borrower may not repay, or that by the time repayment happens, the currency the loan is measured in might have lost value.

Both of those considerations get weightier with time: The longer I have to delay my consumption the more I want to get paid for it, and the more time that passes before repayment, the more things can happen to interfere with it.

If you have one particular borrower -- the US government, say -- who owes money on a bunch of different time scales, you can plot out a "yield curve": the interest rate on bonds that come due in 1 year, in 2 years, 10 years, 30 years, and so on. Given the discussion above, you'd expect the yield curve to slope upwards: longer maturities correspond to higher interest rates. And most of the time that's true.

Wednesday, though, the interest rate on the 10-year US bond fell below the 2-year rate for the first time since 2007. That created an "inverted yield curve", i.e., one that slopes downward, not upward.

For investors, an inverted yield curve is like birds migrating in the wrong direction or the jungle going silent at a time when it usually chatters: It's a sign that something is seriously wrong. (You might take a clue from the "since 2007" above. The economy got pretty ugly in 2008.) So the inversion touched off a fast 800-point loss in the Dow Jones average.

The panic is partly superstitious and partly legitimate. (Superstition matters in the stock market because traders are always trying to guess what other traders might do. So while of course I'm not superstitious myself, those other traders ...) Here's the legitimate part: Think about why some investor might be willing to accept a lower interest rate on a 10-year loan than a 2-year loan. And the answer is: He's worried that when the 2-year loan comes due, interest rates might be lower than they are now.

Imagine, for example, that you could earn 2% on a 2-year loan but only 1.5% on a 10-year. (The actual inversion is much smaller than this, but I'm trying to keep the numbers simple.) So you invest $1,000 at 2% and get $20 per year in interest rather than the $15 you'd get on the 10-year loan. But then at the end of two years, you get your $1,000 back, and now an 8-year loan will only get you 1%. Then you'd say, "Damn, I wish I'd taken the 1.5%, because then I'd get $15 a year for the next eight years rather than $10."

So an inverted yield curve reflects the market's expectation that interest rates are likely to go down. Falling interest rates, in turn, mainly happen during recessions. (In December, 2008, short-term interest rates in the US were .25%.) So the inverted yield curve is predicting a recession.

The inverted yield curve is happening at the same time as another anomalous event: European government bonds are paying negative interest rates. Irish Times reports:

[O]ddities now abound. Danish lender Jyske Bank last week issued a 10-year mortgage bond at an interest rate of -0.5 per cent, meaning homeowners are being paid to borrow. Meanwhile, Swiss bank UBS is planning to charge its super-rich clients for holding on to cash.

So a lot of stock traders are just plain spooked, and I can't say I blame them.

Another source of anxiety: Germany may already be in recession. A recession is usually defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Germany has reported one.

But here's an interesting spin on that: Countries where the workforce is shrinking (Germany is one), can simultaneously have a shrinking GDP and rising (or stable) incomes for individuals. Is it really fair to call that a recession? As populations stabilize in more and more countries, perhaps our targets for economic growth need to be adjusted.

That point is particularly significant for the United States. If Trump gets his way and immigration goes way down, but the birth rate stays low, GDP growth targets in the 3-4% range become unreasonable.

and Trump supporters

From the WaPo article "'He gets it.' Evangelicals aren't turned off by Trump's first term":

While they cheer Trump’s many efforts to chip away at LGBT rights, they are much more concerned with protecting their own right to maintain their opposition. They want to be able to teach their values without interference — some churchgoers fretted about school textbooks that refer to transgender identities without condemnation and about gay couples showing up in TV commercials every time they try to watch a show with their children.

This attitude explains a lot: Conservative Christians have pushed their boundaries out so far that it's impossible for other people to live their lives without "interfering" with them. The old adage was: "Your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose." But Evangelicals don't look at things that way. In order to be "free", they have to control the textbooks the rest of us use and the TV the rest of us watch.

It's a kind of freedom that not everybody can have. Just them.

Another long thoughtful WaPo article about evangelical Trump supporters concluded with this:

Is there a way to reverse hostilities between the two cultures in a way that might provoke a truce? It is hard to see. Is it even possible to return to a style of evangelical politics that favored “family values” candidates and a Billy Graham-like engagement with the world, all with an eye toward revival and persuasion? It is hard to imagine.

Or was a truly evangelical politics — with an eye toward cultural transformation — less effective than the defensive evangelical politics of today, which seems focused on achieving protective accommodations against a broader, more liberal national culture? Was the former always destined to collapse into the latter? And will the evangelical politics of the post-Bush era continue to favor the rise of figures such as Trump, who are willing to dispense with any hint of personal Christian virtue while promising to pause the decline of evangelical fortunes — whatever it takes? And if hostilities can’t be reduced and a detente can’t be reached, are the evangelicals who foretell the apocalypse really wrong?

A number of articles talk about how tired Trump supporters are of being called racists. The Atlantic quotes a 50-year-old woman at a Trump rally in Cincinnati:

"I’m sick to death of it. I have 13 grandchildren—13,” she continued. “Four of them are biracial, black and white; another two of them are black and white; and another two of them are Singapore and white. You think I’m a racist? I go and I give them kids kisses like nobody’s business."

This is a response I've run into fairly often in reading interviews: I can't be racist because I have non-whites in my family (just like Trump can't be anti-Semitic because of Jared and Ivanka). It's an amped-up version of the some-of-my-best-friends-are-Jewish line that people would use when I was young.

I'm not sure why anyone thinks this is a get-out-of-racism-free card. The fact that you can make exceptions for people who are very close to you doesn't mean that you don't have prejudices. The essence of being close to someone is that you see that person as an individual, rather than as an example of a type. Your bigotry against the type may be completely untouched by your love for the individual.

A few facts about Trump's speech to Shell petrochemical workers at a new plastics plant near Pittsburgh on Tuesday:

  • It was an official presidential event, with Trump's expenses paid by taxpayers, even though he gave a campaign speech. He ran down Democrats in general and "Pocahontas" [Elizabeth Warren] and "Sleepy Joe" [Biden] in particular. He told the union workers to vote their leaders out if they didn't support his re-election. That sort of campaigning at taxpayer expense is illegal. “In a free and open democracy, the government doesn’t use taxpayer resources to keep itself in power,” [Jordan] Libowitz [of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington] told Vox. “That’s what authoritarian dictatorships do.”
  • He lied about how well he's doing in the polls, and "joked" about calling off the 2020 elections and going on to serve a 3rd and 4th term.
  • He falsely took credit for the new plastics plant's existence. The commitment to build it was made during the Obama administration.
  • CNN's David Dale listed a number of other false or bizarre claims.
  • Esquire's Jack Holmes claims one of the lies -- that he's responsible for the Veteran's Choice program Obama signed into law in 2014 -- was told for the 80th time.
  • The workers would have lost that week's overtime pay if they hadn't attended, and they were instructed not to protest.

Elaborating a bit on the first point, official events are things like ribbon-cuttings. Past presidents have used them in a general image-building sort of way: They give upbeat remarks about how well the country is doing, lay out their vision for the future, make generically patriotic remarks, and so on. If they stray into campaigning -- asking for support, running down their opponents, etc. -- their campaign or political party is supposed to reimburse the government for the trip's expenses. Trump hasn't done that.

A subsequent Trump rally in Manchester had its own batch of lies, including the claim that he would have won New Hampshire in 2016 if not for voter fraud. This drew a response from Federal Election Commission Chair Ellen Weintraub, who wrote the president a letter.

Trump has made these claims before, and Weintraub has asked him to give his evidence to the FEC so that the alleged fraud can be investigated. But Trump has never responded, and has never provided any evidence in any forum.

The American people are ill-served when our leaders put forward unfounded allegations of voter fraud. To put it in terms that a former casino operator should understand: There comes a time when you need to lay your cards on the table or fold.

but I wrote about guns

The featured post is my attempt to rewrite the Second Amendment, and to explain why we need to rewrite it.

Meanwhile, various Democratic candidates put out their own gun plans: Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, and others. It remains to be seen what (if anything) the Senate will vote on when the congressional recess ends after Labor Day.

and you also might be interested in ...

The New York City medical examiner has officially concluded that Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself. So of course all conspiracy theories immediately dried up (in some alternate universe).

Anyway, however he died, here's hoping a full investigation tells the story of what he did, who helped him do it, and who went along for the ride. Democrats, Republicans -- I don't care.

A prison worker drove a truck into a crowd of Never Again Action protesters outside a private prison where ICE is holding immigrants. The crowd then surrounded the truck until prison guards pepper-sprayed them. The driver wasn't arrested, but did later resign.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOPPMf43Cho

According to NOAA, July was the hottest month ever.

Nine of the 10 hottest Julys have occurred since 2005—with the last five years ranking as the five hottest. Last month was also the 43rd consecutive July and 415th consecutive month with above-average global temperatures.

Think about that: It's been 34 years since the Earth has had a cool month.

The United Methodist denomination may split over LGBTQ issues.

Here's how big a propaganda victory Kim Jong Un believes he got from his meetings with Trump: He put their picture on a postage stamp.

I refuse to waste my attention on Trump's fantasy of buying Greenland. I liked Amy Klobuchar's tweet:

The difference between Donald Trump and Greenland? Greenland is not for sale.

Trump has taken a stand as an anti-anti-fascist.

and let's close with something portentious

Brexit is written in the clouds:

I want to point out what this portent signifies: The way for Britain to leave the EU is without Northern Ireland.

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Monday, August 12, 2019

Suggested Solutions

The language of infestation inevitably suggests the “solution” of extermination.

- Bret Stephens, "Trump's Rhetoric and Conservative Denial" (8-8-2019)

That's the fundamental con at the heart of Donald Trump. He says: "I'm going to hurt these people and I'm going to help you." And he can deliver on the first part, but he's done just about nothing on the second.

- Chris Hayes "Trump Can't Help, So He Hurts" (8-8-2019)

This week's featured post is "Republican Whataboutism Gets More Desperate".

This week everybody was talking about guns

Facing criticism about the harmony between his anti-immigrant rhetoric and the manifestos of white-supremacist mass-murderers (discussed in more detail in the featured post), even President Trump wants to avoid the appearance of blocking action to limit gun violence. So he vaguely says he is for "intelligent" and "meaningful" background checks, and perhaps some measures to keep guns away from the mentally ill (though he relaxed such measures shortly after he took office). But he also tweeted that the NRA's "very strong views" would be "fully represented and respected". He made similar noises after the Parkland shooting and did nothing.

Mitch McConnell refused to interrupt the Senate's recess to act on bills the House already passed, but promised that the Senate will "discuss" guns when it returns in September.

What we can't do is fail to pass something. The urgency of this is not lost on any of us.

But it's not clear what "something" might be, or if he will feel the same urgency after the heat dies down a little, as it presumably will by the time Congress reconvenes.

In general, Republicans want to blame our gun-violence problem on anything but guns: video games, mental illness, the lack of prayer in schools, and so on. But other countries have all that stuff and don't have weekly mass shootings like we do. The difference is that we have lots and lots of guns.

Guess what? Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that. Her goal is to reduce gun deaths by 80%.

Warren is going beyond some of the more commonly discussed ideas, such as stricter background checks or a ban on assault weapons. Her plan calls for creating a federal licensing system, limiting the number of firearms someone could buy, raising the minimum age to 21 for purchasing a gun, holding gun manufacturers liable (and, in some cases, even holding gun industry CEOs personally liable).

She also wants to raise taxes for gun manufacturers (from 10% to 30% on guns and from 11% to 50% on ammunition).

Additionally, Warren's plan calls for $100 million annual investment into gun violence research. She points out that the frequency of automobile deaths in the United States declined with widespread safety measures, such as seat belts and air bags. With the same approach, she says, her goal of an 80% reduction in gun-related deaths could be achieved.

The satirical site McSweeney's: "God Has Heard Your Thoughts and Prayers and He Thinks They Are Fucking Bullshit".

Hi. God here. I am contacting you in response to your prayers regarding the most recent and totally horrific mass shooting in a college/ high school/ elementary school/ bar/ nightclub/ park/ shopping mall/ concert/ movie theater/ parking lot/ church/ mosque/ synagogue. I have listened to your prayers, America, and I have come to the conclusion that they are cowardly, pointless, and shameful. Your prayers are not helping the victims or their families. Helping potential and actual gun violence victims is a bridge you could have crossed a long time ago, and you chose not to. You pray in order not to feel culpable in horrendous acts of violence. You pray in order to feel good. And for this, I say: fuck you.

and ICE raids

Wednesday, ICE raided seven different sites -- mostly poultry processing plants -- in Mississippi, arresting 680 people as undocumented immigrants. Owners and managers of the plants have not been arrested, and Time says "They might never be. They typically aren’t."

The raids coincided with the first day of school

leaving friends, neighbors and, in some instances, strangers to temporarily care for children who did not know whether they would see their parents again, according to CNN affiliate WJTV.

Neither school officials nor local social-service agencies had any advance warning. ThinkProgress:

The morning raids at workplaces created confusion at schools around the state later in the day, as the children of people arrested were reportedly left uncertain where to go and what to do when their parents did not arrive to pick them up at the end of the day.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post fleshed out reports of undocumented immigrants employed by the Trump Organization.

President Trump “doesn’t want undocumented people in the country,” said one worker, Jorge Castro, a 55-year-old immigrant from Ecuador without legal status who left the company in April after nine years. “But at his properties, he still has them.”

Many Trump Organization properties use the same in-house construction company: Mobile Payroll Construction LLC.

In January, Eric Trump ... said the company was instituting E-Verify, a voluntary federal program that allows employers to check the employment eligibility of new hires, “on all of our properties as soon as possible.” And the company began auditing the legal status of its existing employees at its golf courses, firing at least 18.

But nothing changed on the Trump construction crew, according to current and former employees.

A spokeswoman for the Trump Organization said Mobile Payroll Construction is enrolled in E-Verify for any new hires. The company is still not listed in the public E-Verify database, which was last updated July 1.

And the story isn't that tricky immigrants fooled Trump supervisors.

[Edmundo] Morocho said he was one of those laborers. He joined the crew of roughly 15 people in 2000. He said he earned $15 an hour, working Monday through Saturday.

“Nobody had papers,” Morocho said.

In fact, Morocho recalled, [Trump supervisor Frank] Sanzo instructed the crew to buy fake Social Security numbers and green cards in New York so they would have something to put in the Trump Organization files. Morocho said he bought his papers for $50 in 2002.

“Frank said, ‘You can go buy a Social in Queens. They sell them in Queens. Then come back to work. It’s no problem,’ ” Morocho said. “He knew.”

The Post has interviewed 43 undocumented workers who have worked on at least eight Trump properties.

That report (and others like it going back some while) raise an obvious question: Why doesn't ICE ever investigate or raid a Trump property?

Acting Customs and Border Protection commissioner Mark Morgan doesn't want to answer that question, saying only that the public doesn't know what investigations have been done or are ongoing.

Vox called attention to an issue in the background of the immigration debate: At times like this, when the unemployment rate is so low, we don't have enough low-skilled workers.

There were more than 2.1 million open positions for low-skilled workers in March, but only 1.4 million people without college degrees looking for work.

and Trump's visit to two grieving cities

The main thing that came out of Trump's swing through Dayton and El Paso Wednesday was new evidence of what a poor excuse for a human being he is. This isn't a partisan issue. You don't have to be liberal or conservative to know how to act when people are hurting.

I wish I could remember who captioned that Trump photo: "Staff finds missing mental patient."

We have a video of Trump talking to the medical staff inside an El Paso hospital. He says appropriately presidential things for a minute or so -- what a great job they did and how proud the country is of them -- and then he starts lying about how big the crowd was at his El Paso rally in February, and how much smaller Beto's crowd was. 22 people are dead, and his delicate ego won't let him go more than a minute without falsely building himself up and bragging about his popularity.

Trump himself tweeted out a video of his day that was prepared by the White House staff. It splices together scenes of Trump grinning broadly, surrounded by adoring people. (I'm reminded of the parody video The Daily Show did during the 2016 campaign. "Everybody loves me," Black Trump says.) If you watch it, be sure to turn on the audio: The background music would be appropriate for an Avengers movie. It's a video about Trump the Super-Hero, not the victims or the first responders or the strength of the community.

The clincher is the photo Melania tweeted of Trump smiling while she holds a baby whose parents were both killed in the shooting. Thumbs-up for you, little guy. You're an orphan, but you'll always be able to say you met the great Donald Trump.

and Biden's ups and downs

Wednesday, Joe Biden gave a powerful speech [video, text] calling Trump out for his championing of white supremacist themes, and calling on the nation to prove that we are better than Trump thinks we are.

We’re living through a rare moment in this nation’s history where our president isn’t up to the moment, where our president lacks the moral authority to lead, where our president has more in common with George Wallace than he does with George Washington.

And he managed to strike the right balance between the greatness and the tragedy of America: that this nation represents a powerful vision, but has never fully lived up to it. Each generation must try to get closer than the previous one.

The most powerful idea in the history of the world, I think beats in the heart of the people of this country. It beats in all of us. No matter your race, your ethnicity, no matter your gender identity, your sexual orientation, no matter your faith, it beats in the hearts of the rich and poor alike, it unites America whether your ancestors were native to these shores, or they were brought here and forcibly enslaved, or they’re immigrants with generations back, like my family from Ireland or those coming today looking to build a better life for their families.

The American creed that were all created equal was written long ago, but the genius of every generation of Americans has open it wider and wider and wider to include those who have been excluded in a previous generation. That’s why it’s never gathered any dust in our history books. It’s still alive today, more than 200 years after its inception.

This kind of speech was what I had in mind last week when I wrote "Campaigning in a Traumatized Nation". Democratic candidates need to recognize that the reason to vote Trump out isn't just that he has the wrong policies and they have better ones. It goes deeper than that, and Biden talking about "the battle for the soul of this nation" is on the right track.

Unfortunately, Biden broke his momentum with a series of flubs: He said he was VP during the Parkland shooting. Like Trump, he got the name of one of the mass-shooting cities wrong. Trying to say, "Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as wealthy kids", he said "white" instead of "wealthy". He meant to repeat a line from his speech, "We choose truth over lies", but this time it came out: "We choose truth over facts."

This set him up for Trump (who mangles his words even more often than Biden does) to say that Biden has "lost his fastball".

I don't want to run down Joe Biden. He's the current Democratic front-runner, and I'm prepared to vote for him if he's nominated. None of these misstatements suggest to me that he's senile. It's always been hard for Joe to get the right words out, and (as those of us who are aging understand) misplacing a word here or there is a long way from dementia. (I'm actually more alarmed by the word salads Trump so regularly serves up. Biden usually realizes when something didn't come out right, while Trump seems to believe he's making sense.)

But these sorts of mistakes raise the concern that Biden won't provide the right contrast to Trump. The debates might look like two confused old men, each screwing up in his own way.

I understand many Democrats' anxiety that Warren (who I think is much sharper than Biden) might be too liberal to attract the suburban Republicans who flipped in 2018, (though I also appreciate the counter-argument that a more radical message might raise turnout among younger and more alienated voters). But if you want a centrist, candidates like Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker are very sharp. Going down the stretch, I would feel more confidence in either of them than in Biden.

and you also might be interested in ...

Jeffrey Epstein apparently committed suicide by hanging himself in prison Saturday. In late July he was found unconscious in his cell with marks on his neck, so you'd think prison officials would have been on the lookout for a suicide attempt. His death raises questions about whether we will ever know the full extent of his trafficking of underage girls, who else might have been involved, or how exactly he wrangled a sweetheart deal with federal prosecutors the last time he was arrested.

As you'd expect, conspiracy theories are rampant: Powerful people (Trump if you're liberal, Bill Clinton if you're conservative) didn't want him telling what he knows about them, and so on. It's natural to wonder, and to insist authorities provide some answers about how this happened. But at the same time we have to admit that (at this point) none of us actually know anything.

Of course, that doesn't stop Trump from retweeting a conspiracy theory.

Chris Hayes makes an important point: When Trump arrests immigrant parents without giving a thought to what will happen to their kids, or deports a diabetic man to die in Iraq, or inflicts some other cruelty on people his base dislikes ... does that actually help any of his supporters? Hayes thinks not.

That's the fundamental con at the heart of Donald Trump. He says: "I'm going to hurt these people and I'm going to help you." And he can deliver on the first part, but he's done just about nothing on the second.

Miners and factory workers benefit hardly at all from the recent growth in the economy, and farmers are suffering from Trump's trade wars, but corporations and the very rich enjoy a big tax cut. Undocumented migrant workers get arrested, but not the owners who hired them. (Trump even commuted the sentence of one major employer-of-the-undocumented who was convicted of money laundering during the Obama years.)

That's the deal: You in Lordstown, you're not going to get to keep your job. But instead, you're going to get real acts of savage cruelty against some struggling families down in Mississippi, while Trump stuffs fatcats full of cash and parties with them in the Hamptons.

And meanwhile, all the structural inequalities in America, the great hollowing out of the industrial core and rural America, and the declining life expectancies for the first time since World War II, the 70,000 people we're losing every year to opioids -- all that will go on. Because Trump and his party and his donors could not possibly care less about all of that. "But look over here at the people I'm hurting, because that's all you're going to get."

Two weeks ago, I suggested "Enough!" as the Democrats' best anti-Trump slogan, and at least one Sift reader ordered some "Enough." bumperstickers from Cafe Press. Looking at it, I think the period works better than the exclamation point I suggested.

This week Time used it to refer to mass shootings.

This also is a very clever anti-Trump sticker.

McSweeney's again: The NYT announces that "In order to keep our editorial page completely balanced, we are hiring more dipshits."

Here at the New York Times, we believe that all sides of the story should be tolerated and explored, from white supremacists being actually kinda cool if you think about it to people who believe that saying college campuses should be less PC is somehow an interesting use of 1,000 words. That’s why we’re expanding our editorial staff to include more dipshits. Because everyone, no matter how intellectually lazy their conservatism, deserves a column in our newspaper.

For the most part, American voters believe in democracy. But more and more, Republican legislatures do not.

And so we have situations like the one in Florida, where in 2018 voters overwhelmingly passed a referendum allowing felons (other than murderers and rapists) to regain their voting rights after they serve their sentences. Prior to that, a felony resulted in permanent disenfranchisement, and more than 10% of the population was disenfranchised. That 10% was disproportionately poor and black.

But now the Republican legislature and narrowly elected Republican governor Ron DeSantis have largely undone that expansion of democracy. The NYT reports:

The law, which took effect July 1, requires people with a felony conviction to pay off all costs, fines, fees and any restitution arising from their conviction before they are eligible to register to vote.

As the lawmakers surely knew when they wrote the law, they would be re-disenfranchising a large number of people who just had their rights restored. Only about one in five Floridians with criminal records have fully paid their financial obligations, according to an estimate by an expert in voting and elections at the University of Florida, who analyzed data from 48 of Florida’s 67 counties.

The 4/5ths who re-lose their rights are, of course, the poorest ones. The effect is similar to a poll tax.

The burden of these fines and fees falls heavier on black voters, who are poorer; more likely to be unemployed; and more likely to be arrested, charged and convicted. Before voters approved Amendment 4, one in five black Floridians of voting age were barred from voting because of a criminal conviction — twice the rate of whites.

... Florida Republicans, like their counterparts in other states and in Washington, D.C., are becoming increasingly comfortable with the perks of minority rule, like the ability to disregard what the majority of voters demand. They appear to know that when you can’t win on your ideas, you win by undermining democracy.

This is not just minority rule, but minority rule tipped towards whites. By passing laws like these, Republicans become the party of white supremacy in a very literal sense.

Here we see the kinds of young people who form "Team Mitch", having their picture taken groping and choking a cardboard cut-out of Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the annual "Fancy Farm" political picnic in Kentucky. (The original caption: "Break me off a piece of that.") McConnell denies they are campaign staff, but they seem to be volunteers; a different photo with many of the same young men appears on the official Team Mitch Instagram account. In that photo they're holding giant headshots of Brett Kavanaugh, who I imagine was much the same at that age.

Kashmir is a Muslim-majority region that India regards as belonging to it, but Pakistan also claims parts of. It is remote and mountainous, and has mainly symbolic value to the two rival countries.

For decades India has tried to minimize tensions by allowing Kashmir a large amount of autonomy. But the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi has changed that policy, making Kashmir a federal territory more directly under national rule. Kashmiris don't like this change, but it's unclear exactly how they'll resist it.

Salman Rushdie's family is Kashmiri, though he was born in Mumbai. His novel Shalimar the Clown centers on Kashmir, and how external rivalries corrupt an idyllic land.

and let's close with some perfect timing

The Moon decides to take a break by resting in a radio telescope dish.

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Monday, August 5, 2019

Desperate Fear

Back of the writhing, yelling, cruel-eyed demons who break, destroy, maim and lynch and burn at the stake, is a knot, large or small, of normal human beings, and these human beings at heart are desperately afraid of something. Of what? Of many things, but usually of losing their jobs, being declassed, degraded, or actually disgraced, of losing their hopes, their savings, their plans for their children, of the actual pangs of hunger, of dirt, of crime.

- W. E. B. DuBois (1935)
quoted in Jon Meacham's The Soul of America (2019)

This week's featured post is "Campaigning in a Traumatized Nation".

This week everybody was talking about the Democratic debates

As I said in more detail in the featured post, I found this round of debates hard to watch. CNN's moderators valued conflict above ideas, and the candidates were only rarely able to rise above that agenda. Particularly on the first night, round after round amounted to "Here's a Republican talking point. Would any of you obscure centrist candidates like to pick it up and club the progressives with it?"

I'm not sure why Joe Biden can't just say: "Men of my generation have seen enormous changes in our lifetimes, and those of us who have been paying attention have had to change our ideas about a lot of things." I don't know why he thinks he has to defend positions he wouldn't take today.

and two mass shootings

It's ironic that just last week, Ilhan Omar was taking heat for an interview in which she said that “if fear was the driving force behind policies to keep Americans safe” (a condition that was edited out of the viral video) "we should be profiling, monitoring and creating policies to fight the radicalization of white men."

Saturday the nation saw yet another example of what she was talking about: a 21-year-old white man from a Dallas suburb opened fire in an El Paso WalMart, killing 20 and wounding 26. Minutes before, a white-supremacist manifesto (assumed to be his) appeared online, citing the "Hispanic invasion" of Texas.

They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.

Sunday in Dayton, another man killed nine people and wounded 27 in an attack that lasted on about 30 seconds. The gunman had an AR-15 with a 100-round magazine. (Is there any justification for a 100-round magazine being legal?) So far we don't know his motive.

Mitch McConnell's twitter response:

The entire nation is horrified by today's senseless violence in El Paso. Elaine's and my prayers go out to the victims of this terrible violence, their families and friends, and the brave first responders who charged into harm’s way.

This tweet demonstrates so much wrong-headedness.

  • This violence is not "senseless"; it appears to have had the very definite purpose of killing Hispanics, and is a direct response to the "invasion" rhetoric coming from McConnell's party and president. Republicans used to be horrified that Obama refused to "name the enemy" as "radical Islamic terrorism". When are they going to say the words "white supremacist terrorism"? When are they going to stop amplifying that enemy's rhetoric?
  • Once again, Republicans respond to gun violence with "prayers" rather than legislation. But why should God help a country that is so unwilling to help itself?

One Republican who did say the words is Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana. He tweeted:

I deployed to Afghanistan as a response to radical Islamic terrorism. We now face a different enemy that has also emerged from the shadows but demands the same focus and determination to root out and destroy. #WhiteSupremacistTerrorism should be named, targeted and defeated.

Trump played his usual game, issuing a statement that said various right things, and then trying to cash in.

We cannot let those killed in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, die in vain. Likewise for those so seriously wounded. We can never forget them, and those many who came before them. Republicans and Democrats must come together and get strong background checks, perhaps marrying this legislation with desperately needed immigration reform. We must have something good, if not GREAT, come out of these two tragic events!

He looks to be supporting background checks, a very popular and painless remedy that Republicans have blocked in the past. But what he's really saying is that he might be willing to support checks as part of a package that also included the immigration provisions that he really wants. He's holding background checks hostage.

If you actually support something, you support it on its own. You don't expect a pay-off.

Both President Trump and top House Republican Kevin McCarthy politicized the tragedy to use it against violent video games. This is a popular GOP/NRA talking point, because (let's face it) the GOP is dominated by older people who never play video games. The point is absurd on its face, because the Netherlands and South Korea (which have more game players but fewer guns) don't have our mass-murder problem. The graph below is a little hard to read, but the dot all by itself at the top is the US, while the outliers at the bottom-right are South Korea and the Netherlands. Canada, the country most culturally similar to the US, has slightly higher video-game spending, but way fewer gun murders.

and the Ratcliffe nomination

The country dodged a bullet when Texas Congressman John Ratcliffe's nomination as Director of National Intelligence got pulled. But there are probably more bullets coming.

The law creating the position says:

Any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.

But this is the Trump administration, so of course Ratcliffe had nothing of the kind. He auditioned for the DNI position during the Robert Mueller hearing by advancing the idea that Volume II of Mueller's report, which listed the times when Trump may have obstructed justice, should never have been written, and was in fact illegal. So Ratcliffe has what Trump is seeking in a high-profile job candidate: He looks good on TV and is willing to spout nonsense in Trump's defense.

Unfortunately, he started with lukewarm support from Republican senators like Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr, and then the media discovered that Ratcliffe's already thin claims of relevant experience were inflated. Trump tweeted the nomination's withdrawal, while complaining that Ratcliffe had been treated "very unfairly".

I'm not hoping for a better nominee, though, because that's not what Trump's looking for. Tuesday he told reporters:

We need somebody strong that can really rein it in because as I think you've all learned the intelligence agencies have run amok. They run amok.

"Run amok", in this case, means to tell him things he doesn't want to hear, like that Russia is still interfering in our elections, MBS killed a Washington Post reporter, Kim Jong Un is not going to denuclearize, climate change is a national security threat, and so forth.

By law, Deputy DNI Sue Gordon, a qualified intelligence professional, assumes the DNI role until the Senate approves a replacement. But this is the Trump administration, so the law may not matter. Trump reports that Gordon is being "considered" for the acting DNI job.

It's important to notice what's happening here.

When Trump was naming his original cabinet, there was a sense that some roles were too serious for the kind of stooges he was inclined to nominate elsewhere. Maybe it didn't matter so much that Ben Carson knew nothing about urban housing and Rick Perry didn't even know what his department did. Maybe Betsy DeVos' main qualifications to oversee American education were big donations to Republicans and an abiding hatred of public schools. Maybe Scott Pruitt (EPA) and Tom Price (HHS) were bringing scandals with them into their new jobs. But some positions were serious, and they needed serious people in them -- even in the Trump administration.

And so that first cabinet had James Mattis as Secretary of Defense, John Kelly as Secretary of Homeland Security, and Dan Coats as Director of National Intelligence -- because even Donald Trump had to acknowledge that national security was important and demanded serious people at the top.

At the time, Paul Waldman proclaimed it "the worst cabinet in American history", and summed up its members as:

a combination of ethical problems, inexperience, hostility to the missions of the departments its members are being called to lead, and plain old ignorance that is simply unprecedented

None of us imagined we'd look back on that cabinet with nostalgia. But now we do. Because Trump has decided that his whims and hunches are all that really matters and has been reshaping the government accordingly. Trump doesn't want be surrounded by people who make him face reality and tell him he can't do things he wants to do. He doesn't want a science advisor to tell him climate change is real and demands action, a DHS secretary to tell him he has to obey the law, an FBI director to tell him Russia helped make him president, or an economist to tell him that his tariffs won't work.

If you want a clear example of why Trump needs a DNI who will push him in the general direction of reality, consider this tweet from Friday:

Chariman Kim has a great and beautiful vision for his country, and only the United States, with me as President, can make that vision come true.

Trump continues not to admit that Russia helped him and is continuing to help him. Asked Thursday whether he mentioned the issue to Vladimir Putin in the wake of the clear alarm bells in Robert Mueller's testimony, Trump treated the whole idea as an absurdity: "You don't really believe this. Do you believe this?"

Jeff Sessions may have wanted to make America more like Alabama, but he was not the threat to the rule of law that Bill Barr is. When Trump instructed him to quash legitimate investigations and start bogus ones, Sessions refused. Unlike Barr, Sessions saw himself as the chief legal officer of the United States, not the personal attorney of Donald Trump.

Mattis has been replaced at Defense by Mark Esper, who was named by The Hill as one of the top lobbyists of 2016. One of his first acts was to interfere in a big corporate contract, apparently as part of Trump's grudge against Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, whose Amazon subsidiary looked likely to get a big piece.

Do you even know who's in charge of DHS right now, as it runs concentration camps on our border? It's Acting Secretary Kevin McAleenan, who has served since Kirstjen Nielsen resigned in April. Trump has not submitted a nominee to the Senate.

and the trade war

Trump unexpectedly announced new tariffs on Chinese goods Thursday. China retaliated by letting its currency drop, which could destabilize a bunch of trading relationships around the globe. The Chinese government also suspended imports of American agricultural goods. Markets around the world are plunging today.

and Mitch McConnell

Mitch McConnell is up for reelection next year. It's looking like he might face some vigorous opposition this time.

In addition to his own race, Mitch is likely to be the face of the Republican Party in every Senate race in the country. One of the attacks against McConnell is the nickname "Moscow Mitch" which he has earned by blocking all efforts to make our elections more secure from Russian interference.

He apparently hates that nickname, so of course everyone is going to back off and stop using it.

and you also might be interested in ...

The Trump administration lost another court case: A district court judge in Washington invalidated the administration's rule making immigrants ineligible for asylum if they cross the border somewhere other than a designated entry port.

The judge's order makes what seems to me like a compelling argument. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 says:

Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien’s status may apply for asylum

The Trump administration argued that its new rule did prevent people from applying for asylum; it just made them ineligible to receive it. The judge wasn't buying that distinction.

In practice, the new rule was often coupled with a refusal to process asylum claims at ports of entry, essentially shutting off the possibility of claiming asylum in the US, which is a treaty obligation.

With Trump bashing cities like Baltimore, 24/7 Wall Street's list of the 25 worst places to live in America became topical again. It ranked counties according to an index based on poverty rate, bachelors degree attainment rate, and life expectancy. No urban counties make the list.

Nearly every county on this list falls into one of three categories: counties in Appalachian coal country, Southern counties along or near the Mississippi River, and those that lie within Native American reservations.

I could imagine quibbling with the criteria, maybe by adding some measure of violent crime. And at first I wondered about making bachelors degrees such a big component -- until I tried to imagine living in a place like McDowell County, WV (#4 on the list), where only 4.9% have bachelors degrees. Picture that: There must be some teachers in the public schools. The federal government has to have some kind of presence. There has to be a doctor or two somewhere. Who else?

Amanda Marcotte, responding to an Atlantic article about Trump supporters who are "tired of being called racists":

Time and again, the argument Trump supporters make against being called “racist” basically boils down to saying they’re fine with black people as long as they maintain a subservient, apologetic, inferior position.

Glaciers extend into the ocean, and it turns out that the underwater melting is much more extreme than previously thought.

The GOP's only black congressman is retiring.

Here's something you didn't know, because you're not watching the right televangelists: The Impossible Burger is part of a "Luciferian" plot. The point is to "change God's creation" (because normal hamburgers just happen, without any human intervention), and the ultimate goal is "to change the DNA of humans ... to create a race of soulless creatures". Don't say you weren't warned.

The Raw Data podcast "Kinetic Effects" is well worth listening to. It discusses how Russian disinformation campaigns work, including interference in the 2016 election. It concludes with this illuminating exchange.

Mike Osborne (host): What's the one thing you want people to know about disinformation?

Kate Starbird (expert): This is such a hard one. But I think the most important thing is not that we become cynics or skeptics to the Nth degree. I think the most important thing is for us to start identifying whom we can trust, rather than backing away and stop trusting everybody.

Mike Osborne: The answer I thought you were going to give is that we are all vulnerable, that none of us are immune from disinformation.

Kate Starbird: Yeah, I've been saying that a lot. And I hate to leave people with that, because I think that almost feeds into the goals of disinformation, which are to have us back away, to have us not know that we can trust information, and back away from the political sphere, get back on our heels. And the society that doesn't know where it can go for trusted information is a society that's easily controlled. It's more important for us to find people and sources and voices that we can trust, than for us to stop trusting everything.

The new chair of the Florida Board of Education said this in 2008, when he was vice chair of a county school board:

As a person of faith, I strongly oppose any study of evolution as fact at all. I’m purely in favor of it staying a theory and only a theory. I won’t support any evolution being taught as fact at all in any of our schools.

and let's close with something sweet

While looking for the list of worst counties mentioned above, I ran into a much more appealing list: The best ice cream parlor in every state.

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